


this is a low, but it won't hurt you

by wolfhalls



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, but some tenderness too! jango was a Good Dad, written before the season 2 finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:00:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28069698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfhalls/pseuds/wolfhalls
Summary: Djarin pulls a little metal ball out from his pocket, and rolls it between his palms. “Do you remember your father? Really, properly?”Boba's father exists in a strange in-between now. Sometimes he is clear-voiced and vibrant, as if he’s only in the next room. Other days, Boba can just about conjure the image of his hand on a blaster, can just about remember the weight of that same hand on his  shoulder.“Not as much as I’d like,” he says.(or: Boba is raised with love. years later, he sees another man trying to do the same.)
Relationships: Boba Fett & Jango Fett, Din Djarin & Boba Fett
Comments: 69
Kudos: 527





	this is a low, but it won't hurt you

**Author's Note:**

> well, here we are. this is basically Temuera Morrison: The Fanfic. i just love boba and his gay murder dad. 
> 
> title comes from [this is a low](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZIYAUPo80U) by blur.

When Boba is eight years old, he busts his knee open in a scuffle with one of the clones. He learns quickly that they’re faster and stronger than him. However, he also learns that even with the docility that’s been bred into them by the Kaminoans, they can still be provoked. 

“You shouldn’t have done that,” his father says. He winds a bandage around Boba’s knee, shushing him when he winces. “Now you’ll have a nasty scar.” 

“Can’t you put some bacta on it?” Boba asks. He’s seen his father douse himself in the stuff. 

“No,” his father says. “No bacta, and you’ll have a scar. That’s now you’ll learn.” He sits back on his heels, and pats Boba on his other knee, the one that’s barely scuffed. “What were you doing picking a fight, anyway?”

“I was bored,” Boba says. “I wanted to see if they were the same as me.” 

“Ah, _ad'ika,_ ” his father says. He rises, and sits next to Boba on the couch. He pulls him close, his arm a strong pressure around Boba’s shoulders. “You’re nothing like them.” 

The rain lashes against the window, and Boba looks out to the roiling ocean. His knee throbs, and he can hear the sure, steady beat of his father’s heart. 

-

At three years old he is balanced on his father’s hip and given a blaster for the first time. He doesn’t remember this - how could he? A flickering holopic tells him that this happened. A flickering holopic tells him that his father laughed as Boba tried to grab the blaster, held just out of his reach. 

A flickering holopic tells him that his father loved him.

This, Boba does remember. 

He hears Djarin climbing up into the cockpit, and at the press of a button the holopic disappears, his father’s smiling face with it. 

\- 

His father dies, as all fathers do. Boba sees it happen - sees him hesitate for just a second too long, reaching to activate his jetpack before-

The scar on Boba’s knee has faded to white now, a jagged line that stands out against the tan of his skin. Boba presses a hand to it as he sits in the sand, the smell of blaster fire close to suffocating. He looks at his father’s helmet, and the path forward narrows. Only wide enough for one now. 

Three days earlier, Boba had sat and watched as his father polished his armour. “This is going to be yours one day,” he’d said. “So I have to take care of it.”

“No,” Boba had said. “You’ll need it. I’ll get my own armour, and we can work together.” He had passed his father a cloth. The lights were turned down low, and his father had hummed while he worked. The night had stretched on, and on; and the armour was gleaming by the morning. 

Now, three days later, Jango Fett is dead. For the first time in his life, Boba is alone. 

-

“Your son,” Boba says. “What’s his name?” 

“He’s not-” Djarin starts, but Boba cuts him off with a wave of his hand. 

“What’s his name?” he asks again. 

Djarin doesn’t say anything for a while. Just fiddles with something in his pocket. Just when Boba has given up on him responding at all, he speaks. “Grogu,” he says. “His name is Grogu.” His voice wavers on the name. As if he’s unused to saying it. As if saying it is too painful to bear. 

“Well,” Boba says. “He’s going to be back here with us before too long.” 

Djarin nods, and then lets his head fall back against the hull with a dull _thunk._

-

As he grows up, Boba looks in the mirror and sees his father as he remembers him. 

As he grows older, Boba looks in the mirror and sees his father as he never lived to be. He prods at the lines starting to set in around his eyes. His face is ruined by scars now - the sarlacc's work. 

His father had had a scar on his forehead, a mean dig that pulled every time he frowned. Boba frowns at his reflection, and he is not his father. Then he tilts his head to the side, and the set of his jaw is all Jango. 

Boba wonders how much of his father that lives on in him was learned, and how much is just there in Boba’s blood, fixed in place by the actions of a scientist when he was nothing more than a bunch of cells writhing in a dish. He thinks that he can’t remember what his father sounded like, and then he laughs, something close to hysterical - and it's Jango’s laughter that rings out through the room.

\- 

“It’s affecting you,” Fennec says. She sits at the end of Boba’s bunk, hair loose around her shoulders. She’s beautiful, he supposes. Knitted together by his own handiwork and here with him even though he never asked her to be. It’s been a long while since he travelled with someone, and he’s grateful that it’s her. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” Boba says. 

Fennec rolls her eyes. “The kid,” she says. “Him.”

Djarin keeps his own company, most of the time. In the mornings Boba will find him in the cargo hold, sitting with his back against the hull. When he stands, he shifts his weight like he’s holding something to his side. Someone. 

“Family is everything to my people,” Boba says. He stretches, and nudges at Fennec’s leg with his bare feet. “Besides,” he says. “We’re in his debt.” 

“I think you would have helped him anyway,” Fennec says. 

“Think what you like,” Boba says. “I need to sleep.” 

It’s not a denial. 

-

“When you were this big,” his father says, holding his hands apart in demonstration, “I took you with me on a job.” He ruffles Boba’s hair. “You’d been sick for a little while, and I didn’t want to leave you. We needed the credits though, so along you came.” 

Boba knows that his father need never leave Kamino again, if that is what he wants. Credits or no credits, they would always have a home here. He also knows that he would have been looked after by the Kaminoans, no matter how sick or small he was. Boba doesn’t question any of it. “What was the job?” he asks. 

“A senator’s son was being a little indiscreet,” his father says. “Blaster bolt to the neck stopped him from spilling any more secrets.” 

Boba’s father is blunt when it comes to life and death. In stepping along the narrow line that divides the two, there is money to be earned, a reputation to be built. Boba already knows that the name _Fett_ attracts attention. Fear, respect, revulsion, allegiance. His father is a man of significance.

“Where was I when you did it?” He’s sleepy now, but he loves his father’s stories. Especially when they involve the two of them. 

“You were wrapped up in my cloak,” his father says. “It was raining. I took the shot from a rooftop.” He smooths the bedsheets down, and tucks Boba in. “You didn’t even wake up.” 

-

“What’s Vanth like?” he asks Djarin. 

Djarin starts, as if that’s the thing that he least expected to hear. “What?” he says. 

“Cobb Vanth,” Boba says. “What’s. He. Like?” He scrubs at his armour, readying it for a new coat of paint. He knows which chips and dents are ones that he put there, and which are the work of another man.

“Surprising,” Djarin says. There’s something strange in his voice, and Boba knows that under the helmet Djarin’s face is giving everything away. 

“I could have killed him for it,” Boba says. Djarin tenses at that, and- _ah._ So the trip to that little town in the desert wasn’t just a matter of killing a dragon. Sometimes he doubts that Djarin is really flesh and blood under the beskar, but in moments like this he’s so human. A soft, wanting creature. “Still,” he says. “I didn’t, and here we are. It all worked out in the end.”

(He remembers the marshal of Mos Pelgo being tall and lean. Handsome too, which Boba would have dwelled on more if he hadn't had a long-range rifle aimed at the man’s head. The armour had looked wrong on him, stopping too short on his torso. It was too loose as well, the man beneath it too skinny to fill it out. 

Vanth had ducked into a doorway then, and the window of opportunity to shoot him down had slammed shut. For the first time Boba had wondered if he was getting old. He’d shot a womp rat from the same distance an hour later, and struck true. That had made him feel better.)

“ _I_ was going to kill him for it,” Djarin says. “I was going to blast his head clean off his shoulders and take the armour with me.” 

“Funny how some things turn out,” Boba says. “I bet the people of Mos Pelgo are glad you kept your blaster in its holster.” 

For the first time, Boba hears Djarin laugh. The sound is catching. 

\- 

Boba feels death pull on him as he falls backwards, down into the sarlacc’s great, gaping maw. He feels its tidal tug, as sure as the motion of the seas on Kamino. He thinks of his father, standing tall, a line of shimmering purple coming for his neck.

Jango Fett dies in the sands of Geonosis. His son faces death in the sands of Tatooine, and lives. 

-

Boba learns how to shoot, and how to fly a ship, guided by his father the whole time. He learns how to temper his ways around politicians and scientists, both of which their home on Kamino is teeming with. He learns how to see out a job, how to lose a tail. He learns how to be invisible when needed. 

His father is coarse, but charming and clever all the same. He lies as easily as breathing, weaving a new tapestry of truths with a few carefully chosen words. Boba sees this, and learns. If you’re a good shot, have a ship of your own, and know which version of events is best suited to the telling, you can become great. 

He is ten when his father looks a Jedi in the eye and lies, and all that Boba has ever known is turned on its head. 

“Pack your things. We’re leaving,” his father says, and there’s something in his voice that Boba has never heard before. 

-

“I watched my father die,” he says to Djarin. He adjusts his armour as he speaks. “It never does any good to separate a parent from their child. There’s never any excuse for it.” 

Djarin, taciturn as ever, just inclines his head in acknowledgement. 

“Your boy will be missing you,” Boba says. “Trust me. I know.” 

“So do I,” Djarin says. Boba knows that he was a foundling, but doesn’t press. It’s never good to open wounds before you head into action. Plenty of time for that later, in the quiet. 

Boba grins instead, and feels the action pulling at the scars on his face. “All the more reason to find him, get him out, and blow that ship out of the sky.” 

They sit there together in the cargo hold, Djarin in his shining armour. Boba remembers the gleam of his father’s beskar under the lights of the docking bay on Kamino. Now, that armour is coloured with history, just starting to settle back onto the shape of Boba’s body. He didn’t realise that he’d missed the feeling of it so much until he put it back on again. 

“Thank you,” Djarin says after a while. “Really. You didn’t need to do any of this.” 

“We’re in your debt,” Boba says. He places a hand on Djarin’s shoulder, feeling the tension running through him. “It’s the least we can do.” 

“Your father,” Djarin says. “What was he like?” 

“He was a man of honour,” Boba said. “He always saw a job through to the end.” 

Djarin pulls a little metal ball out from his pocket, and rolls it between his palms. “Do you remember him? Really, properly?”

His father exists in a strange in-between now. Sometimes he is clear-voiced and vibrant, as if he’s only in the next room. Other days, Boba can just about conjure the image of his hand on a blaster, can just about remember the weight of that same hand on his shoulder. 

“Not as much as I’d like,” he says. 

“I know how that feels,” Djarin says. “I don’t want that for-”

“He’s going to be home with you soon,” Boba says, and he means it more than anything he’s said in years.

“Home,” Djarin says. He huffs out a miserable little laugh. “We don’t even have a ship.” 

“He has you,” Boba says. “That’s home enough.” 

\- 

His father passes him a bowl of soup. It’s cold on Fest, and Boba is doing his best to hide that he is shivering. Bundled up in so many layers he can barely bend his arms, he brings the bowl to his lips and swallows the whole thing in a clumsy gulp. He coughs - the soup is sour and spicy and _hot_ \- and his father pats him on the back, laughing all the while. 

“Don’t bolt your food,” he says. He tackles his own bowl decidedly more efficiently, and Boba watches him all the while. He is nine years old, and he knows that one day, he wants to grow up to be just like his father. 

“Where’s the target?” he asks. That’s why they’re here, after all. His father is to take care of a smuggler with outstanding debts, called upon to do so by a band of important people known as the Hutts. Well. People would be pushing it. They look like giant slugs. Still, as his father says, _a job is a job._

“You want some more soup?” his father asks him. This is something that he does a lot. Answering a question with another question. It's also something that Boba has begun to try it out with some of his tutors.

“Maybe,” Boba says. “Where’s the target though?” 

“You’re pushy,” his father says. “I wonder if that’s nature or nurture.” He’s smiling as he says it. He waves the WA-7 droid over and gestures at their empty bowls. He sits back in his chair, and looks out over the plaza. “He’s around,” he says after a while. “We’ll catch him tonight.” 

“Why not now?” Boba asks. 

“Boba,” his father says. “One day, your time will be up - and you’ll wish that you’d enjoyed a few more afternoons like this. So let’s sit here a while.” The droid brings their soup over then, and his father presses some credits into its outstretched palm. “Come on,” he says. “Dig in. Just don’t scarf it this time.” 

Boba sits there, in the freezing cold, and watches his father swirl a spoon through his soup. He picks his up, and does the same.

Later, his father hoists him up onto his shoulders, complaining that Boba’s getting too big for this, that his poor back just can’t take it. Boba knows his father better than anyone else in the galaxy. He knows that his will cannot be bent, that he won’t ever do something that he doesn’t want to. 

Boba winds his arms around his father’s neck, and feels the wind on his face. “Dad,” he says. “You were right. The target can wait.” 

“I'm always right,” his father says. “You’ll do well to remember that.”

Boba does. Later on, years ahead, it’s all he can try to do.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading! i’m over on tumblr @mantelpieces :)


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